Doc's deceased
wife had come from a ranching family in the Bitterroot Valley of western
Montana. When Doc first met her on a fishing vacation nearly twenty years
ago, I think he fell in love with her state almost as much as he did with
her. After her death and burial on her family's ranch, he returned to
Montana again and again, spending the entire summer and holiday season
there, floating the Bitterroot River or cross-country skiing and climbing
in the Bitterroot Mountains with pitons and ice ax. I suspected in Doc's
mind his wife was still with him when he glided down the old sunlit ski
trails that crisscrossed the timber above her burial place. Finally he
bought a log house on the Blackfoot River. He said it was only a vacation
home, but I believed Doc was slipping away from us. Perhaps true peace
might eventually come into his life, I told myself.

Then, just
last June, he invited me for an indefinite visit. I turned my law office
over to a partner for three months and headed north with creel and fly
rod in the foolish hope that somehow my own ghosts did not cross state
lines.

Supposedly the word "Missoula" is from the Salish Indian language and
means "the meeting of the rivers." The area is so named because it is
there that both the Bitterroot and Blackfoot rivers flow into the Clark
Fork of the Columbia.

The wooded
hills above the Blackfoot River where Doc had bought his home were still
dark at 7 A.M., the moon like a sliver of crusted ice above a steep-sided
rock canyon that rose to a plateau covered with ponderosa. The river seemed
to glow with a black, metallic light, and steam boiled out of the falls
in the channels and off the boulders that were exposed in the current.

I picked
up my fly rod and net and canvas creel from the porch of Doc's house and
walked down the path toward the riverbank. The air smelled of the water's
coldness and the humus back in the darkness of the woods and the deer
and elk dung that had dried on the pebbled banks of the river. I watched
Doc Voss squat on his haunches in front of a driftwood fire and stir the
strips of ham in a skillet with a fork, squinting his eyes against the
smoke, his upper body warmed only by a fly vest, his shoulders braided
with sinew.

Following
his acclaimed bestseller Purple Cane Road, James Lee Burke returns with
a triumphant tour de force.

Set in the
Bitterroot Valley of Montana, home to celebrities seeking to escape the
pressures of public life, as well as to xenophobes dedicated to establishing
a bulkhead of patriotic paranoia, Burke's novel features Billy Bob Holland,
former Texas Ranger and now a Texas-based lawyer, who has come to Big
Sky Country for some fishing and ends up helping out an old friend in
trouble.

And big trouble
it is, not just for his friend but for Billy Bob himself -- in the form
of Wyatt Dixon, a recent prison parolee sworn to kill Billy Bob as revenge
for both his imprisonment and his sister's death, both of which he blames
on the former Texas lawman. As the mysteries multiply and the body count
mounts, the reader is drawn deeper into the tortured mind of Billy Bob
Holland, a complex hero tormented by the mistakes of his past and driven
to make things -- all things -- right. But beneath the guise of justice
for the weak and downtrodden lies a tendency for violence that at times
becomes more terrifying than the danger he is trying to eradicate.

As USA Today
noted in discussing the parallels between Billy Bob Holland and Burke's
other popular series hero, David Robicheaux, "Robicheaux and Holland
are two of a kind, white-hat heroes whose essential goodness doesn't keep
them from fighting back. The two series describe different landscapes,
but one theme remains constant: the inner conflict when upright men are
provoked into violence in defense of hearth, home, women, and children.
There are plenty of parallels. Billy Bob is an ex-Texas Ranger; Dave is
an ex-New Orleans cop. Dave battles alcoholism and the ghosts of Vietnam;
Billy Bob actually sees ghosts, including the Ranger he accidentally gunned
down....But most of all, both protagonists hold a vision of a pure and
simple life."

In Bitterroot,
with its rugged and vivid setting, its intricate plot, and a set of remarkable,
unforgettable characters, and crafted with the lyrical prose and the elegiac
tone that have inspired many critics to compare him to William Faulkner,
James Lee Burke has written a thriller destined to surpass the success
of his previous novels.

James
Lee Burke, a rare winner of two Edgar Awards for best crime fiction
ofthe year, is the author of twenty previous novels, including many New
York Times bestsellers.

The Lost
Get-Back Boogie was nominated for a Pulitzer Prise, Black Cherry
Blues won the Edgar Award in 1989; and Cimarron Rose, Burkes
first novel featuring Billy Bob Holland, won the 1997 Edgar Award. Sunset
Unlimited won the CWA/Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction. Tommy Lee
Jones stars in and directed Dixie City Jam. In 2000 Purple Cane
Road was shortlisted for the Macallan Gold Dagger.

He lives
with his wife in Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.